In today's environment, a computing system often includes several components, such as servers, hard drives, and other peripheral devices. These components are generally stored in racks. For a large company, the storage racks can number in the hundreds and occupy huge amounts of floor space. Also, because the components are generally free standing components, i.e., they are not integrated, resources such as floppy drives, keyboards and monitors, cannot be shared.
A system has been developed by International Business Machines Corp. of Armonk, N.Y., that bundles the computing system described above into a compact operational unit. The system is known as an IBM eServer BladeCenter.™ The BladeCenter is a 7U modular chassis that is capable of housing up to 14 individual server blades. A server blade or blade is a computer component that provides the processor, memory, hard disk storage and firmware of an industry standard server. Each blade can be “hot-plugged” into a slot in the chassis. The chassis also houses supporting resources such as power, switch, management and blower modules. Thus, the chassis allows the individual blades to share the supporting resources.
For redundancy purposes, two Ethernet Switch Modules (ESMs) are mounted in the chassis. The ESMs provide Ethernet switching capabilities to the blade server system. The primary purpose of each switch module is to provide Ethernet interconnectivity between the server blades, the management modules and the outside network infrastructure.
Typically when a blade performs a remote boot, e.g., via an external network, it selects a default ESM and initiates a remote boot sequence. While this process is adequate if only a few blades perform remote boots or if the blades perform remote boots at different times, it becomes unmanageable when several blades attempt to boot through the default ESM at roughly the same time. In this situation, the default ESM process creates an effective bottleneck at the default ESM and results in degraded performance.
Accordingly, a need exists for a system and method for balancing the load on at least two ESMs during remote booting. The system and method should not be static and should allow dynamic adjustment of the load depending on the ESM use. The present invention addresses such a need.